Dick Turpin: History of York History of York The myth of Dick Turpin. The myth of Dick Turpin. The Prison building - Turpin will have used this Exercise Yard. Turpin as potrayed in the cell where he spent his final days - York Castle Museum Corridor leading to the Turpin cell in York Castle Museum He wasn’t from York, he wasn’t the dashing outlaw of legend and he didn’t own a horse called Black Bess. But Dick Turpin was tried and executed in the city and his grave can be seen in an otherwise unremarkable graveyard. Born in Essex, Turpin was a member of the violent Gregory Gang, becoming a highwayman when they split up. Having shot and killed a man who attempted to capture him he fled to Yorkshire. He stole horses in Lincolnshire and returned with them to Brough to sell, a trade which was exposed while he was in Beverley House of Correction having shot his landlord’s cockerel. He gave his name as John Palmer. He was moved to York Castle, from where he wrote to his brother asking for help.

His brother refused to pay the sixpence due on the letter and it was returned to the local post office – where Turpin’s old schoolmaster recognised his handwriting. His identity was revealed and he was sentenced to death. At his hanging at Tyburn, Turpin hired five professional mourners to follow him up the scaffold and he put on a show for the large crowd. His body was dug up by a labourer and taken to the garden of a surgeon, who paid for corpses for illegal medical dissection. But York people discovered what had happened and descended in an angry mob on the surgeon’s house, and Turpin was laid to rest for good. The doctor and the labourer were arrested and fined. Turpin became a legend after his death. His story became linked in print with a legendary ride from London to York to establish an alibi, a tale previously attributed to the highwayman William Nevison. This fictional version was further established when it was included in an 1834 bestseller called Rockwood, in which the author Harrison Ainsworth added a new twist: that Turpin’s horse, Black Bess, expired at York after the record-breaking ride. None of this was true.

Resources Dick Turpin, Highwayman Merchant adventurers' Hall Dick Turpin had strong associations with York, in that he spend the latter part of his life as a horse dealer in East Yorkshire and was tried and executed in York. His true story was more squalid than the legend of the dashing Highwayman and his horse Black Bess. The legendary Highwayman was born in 1706 in rural Essex and met his end in York after a career of theft, smuggling, highway robbery, terror and murder. An apprentice butcher he fell into a life of crime and joined the Essex Gang which raided isolated farmhouses across the Home Counties, terrorising, robbing and torturing the occupants. King George offered a reward of £50 for the capture of Turpin and his gang, which was eventually doubled after a vicious attack on the family of a rich farmer. Turpin who had now joined forces with 'Captain' John King a well known highwayman, shot and killed a gamekeeper who tracked him to their hideaway in Epping forest and he then fled north to escape arrest. He lodged at Welton in east Yorkshire and financed a fancy life-style under the name of John Palmer, by stealing horses and cattle.

The end came unexpectedly when Turpin, returning from a hunt meeting with some local toffs, shot the landlords rooster at the Ferry Inn in Brough East Yorkshire. The subsequent enquiries into his bizarre behavior, unearthed his source of wealth and he was held in custody in Beverley before being transferred to York Castle. He wrote to his brother begging for help, but the brother too mean to pay the postage, had the letter returned. Somehow Turpin's former schoolmaster saw the letter and identified the handwriting. He was then asked to travel to York and identified John Palmer as the notorious Richard Turpin. On 7th April 1739 Turpin was hanged at Tyburn on York's Knavesmire. The thumbnails below are linked to larger pictures David Wootton reviews ‘Dick Turpin’ by James Sharpe · LRB 3 February 2005 by James Sharpe Profile, 258 pp, £8.99, January 2005, ISBN 1 86197 418 3 Dick Turpin was executed in York on a cold spring Saturday in 1739.

In those days, before the invention of the trapdoor drop, the prisoner was expected to climb a ladder, the noose around his neck, and step off into space. Turpin, dressed in finery suitable for a wedding or a funeral, died admirably, for he ‘went off this stage with as much intrepidity and unconcern, as if he had been taking horse to go on a journey’. This contemporary description indirectly acknowledges Turpin’s status as a self-defined gentleman (his father was a butcher), for gentlemen took horse, while the poor walked. For weeks, Turpin had been ‘eating, drinking and carousing’, ‘joking, drinking and telling stories’ with an unending stream of visitors to the York jail: his jailer had made £100 selling them drink. Some of those who had laughed and joked with him were gathered that Saturday in the Blue Boar tavern, where his body was laid out after it had been cut down from the scaffold; a few of them had been appointed by Turpin to secure his corpse, which they did by burying it deep in the churchyard the next day. At 3 a.m.

on the Tuesday, however, the body was found to have been dug up, presumably to be sold for dissection. A mob gathered and reclaimed it, carrying it through the streets ‘in a sort of triumph’, and reburied it in a coffin filled with lime to ensure its rapid decomposition. Within a few days, a broadside ballad was published called ‘Turpin’s Rant’, a song which survived into the last century as a folksong, ‘Turpin Hero’, the chorus of which is: ‘For I’m the hero, the Turpin hero, I am the great Dick Turpin Ho.’ ‘Turpin Hero’ is the source of Joyce’s title for the forerunner to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ‘Stephen Hero’. Turpin is no hero to James Sharpe, who sets out to cut him down to size, just another ‘callous, brutal and violent’ criminal, an ‘unpleasant thug’, hardly distinguishable from so many others, so that when The Lives of Noted Highwaymen was published around 1750 he was not deemed worthy of inclusion.

Within the limits he sets himself, Sharpe’s book is admirable: in the first two-thirds he provides an account of Turpin’s life, of 18th-century highwaymen and of the criminal justice system of the day which could scarcely be bettered. Before he became a highwayman Turpin belonged to a gang of poachers in Essex. When they robbed a 70-year-old farmer, Joseph Lawrence, in 1735, they beat him on the bare buttocks, poured boiling water over him, and sat him on the fire in order to force him to say where his money was kept. Turpin played an active part in torturing Lawrence, though not in raping his maidservant, Dorothy Street. When he was eventually arrested, four years later, he was living in Yorkshire under the pseudonym of John Palmer. He came to the attention of the authorities only because, returning one day from hunting, he had shot a tame bird; reprimanded by a bystander, he replied that if the man would only stay while he charged his piece, he would shoot him too.

Charles Harper, in his Half-Hours with the Highwaymen (1908), wrote, as Sharpe wryly records: ‘It would be a thankless task to present the highwayman as he really was: a fellow rarely heroic, generally foul-mouthed and cruel, and often cowardly … I do not think that the historian who came to the subject in this cold scientific spirit of a demonstrator in surgery would be widely read.’ Sharpe’s intention is to prove Harper wrong by at long last anatomising Turpin before the public gaze. He takes pride in bringing to his task the skills of a professional historian, determined to ‘get history right’. He sets out to expose the stories told about Turpin since his death as factually incorrect. Turpin is said, for example, to have been born and to have drunk in the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath, where his father was the landlord – even though the Spaniards was not a pub until after Turpin’s death. So, too, he is supposed to have drunk at the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich, although the battle of Trafalgar took place in 1805.

In the process Sharpe asks, but never answers, a central question: ‘If, as anthropologists remind us, myths have a deeper purpose or significance, what can be read into the invocation of Turpin?’ Sharpe is uncomfortable with myths. For him, Turpin’s brave death is a fact, recorded by eyewitnesses. He knows that it is also an enactment of a myth, that contemporaries called the scaffold a ‘stage’ because the condemned man was playing his part in a drama, but he does not dwell on Turpin’s self-representation. The one thing almost everyone knows about Turpin is that he rode his mare Black Bess from London to York in the course of a single night. This turns out to be a myth – there was no Black Bess, no ride from London to York – yet it has passed for fact since 1834 when Harrison Ainsworth published a novel called Rookwood, in which the story is first told. What interests Sharpe about this story (which he has read in the much abbreviated fifth edition) is that it is false: what should have interested him is that Ainsworth’s readers (and the book was an enormous bestseller) thought it was true.

To understand why they thought so we need to ask just what is being represented in the story of the ride from London to York. Ainsworth’s source for Black Bess was a poem of 1825 which begins: ‘Bold Turpin upon Hounslow Heath/His black mare Bess bestrode.’ But the origins of Turpin’s ride lie much further back, in Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, in which the story is told of a highwayman who had successfully established an alibi by riding in a single day, without a change of horses, from Chatham in Kent to York, where he arrived in the afternoon: the jury refused to believe such a feat was possible. Defoe’s story is ironic, because of course the jury was right: such a ride is straightforwardly impossible. Chatham to York is a journey of more than two hundred miles, as is London to York. In the longest-established endurance horse race, the one-hundred-mile Tevis Cup, the record is held by a horse called R.C.

Hans, who completed the course in 10 hours and 46 minutes; only nine times since 1961, when records began, has the race been won in under 12 hours. Defoe and Ainsworth were thus describing horses going twice as far (and therefore twice as fast) as any horse could go in a 12-hour ride. Readers in the 1830s knew a good deal about horses: why were they prepared to believe this incredible story? First, Ainsworth gave every appearance of having a scrupulous regard for the facts in the part of his story (a mere subplot within a larger historical romance) that was concerned with highwaymen. The rest of the story is about ghosts, graves, Gypsy curses and bolts of lightning, and no one for a moment can have believed it to be true. ‘I may observe,’ Ainsworth wrote in the preface to the fourth edition (the one I have used), ‘that I have not, as yet, been able to obtain satisfactory evidence that the extraordinary equestrian feat, attributed to him by oral tradition, and detailed in this work, was ever actually accomplished.

History is silent on this head.’ His readers seem to have been convinced that, far from acknowledging that he had made the whole thing up, Ainsworth was insisting that his story was surely true, whatever the historians might say. And there is one feature that traps even the most wary reader into thinking of it as true. Why did Turpin ride? Not to establish an alibi; or to escape his pursuers, for he tells them he is bound for York in order to ensure they follow. He rides for immortality. ‘The eye of posterity was upon him … Multitudes, yet unborn, he knew would hear, and laud his deeds. He trembled with excitement.’ This is a moment of extraordinary audacity, for as Ainsworth writes, posterity has yet to hear of Turpin’s ride; by claiming it as already famous Ainsworth denied his own part in its invention; he transmuted it from fiction into fact. Ainsworth’s readers believed partly because they wanted to believe, just as modern readers have wanted to believe in Philip Marlowe or James Bond, the highwayman being the 19th-century equivalent of the private eye or secret agent. Ainsworth himself identified with Turpin.

(He claimed to have written his hundred-page account of the ride to York in the same time as the journey took. ‘My pen,’ he wrote, ‘literally scoured over the pages. So thoroughly did I identify with the highwayman, that, once I started, I found it impossible to halt.’) He was so eager that his readers too should identify with him that his critics complained he was writing ‘thieves’ literature’. ‘The road, we must beg to repeat, is still open – the chances are greater than they ever were … we are sadly in want of highwaymen!’ he insisted. The last highwayman had been executed in 1831, however, and none of Ainsworth’s readers took up his invitation. Ian Fleming had been a secret agent, and was in part his own model for Bond. Ainsworth, the eldest son of a wealthy Manchester lawyer, had spent his childhood reading about highwaymen, but was no highwayman himself, though he had Turpin’s contempt for respectable society.

‘We have not had the pleasure of being acquainted with Mrs Ainsworth,’ a correspondent wrote in Fraser’s Magazine, ‘but we are sincerely sorry for her – we deeply commiserate her case.’ Ainsworth, he gives us to understand, is a ‘lady-killer’, he is ‘this Turpin of the cabriolet’. He did not expect his readers literally to become highwaymen, or even lady-killers; but he did expect them to identify with Turpin’s courage, audacity and sangfroid. In a world in which zero-tolerance policing was rapidly reducing the opportunities for criminals, and in which the strains of respectability were pressing ever more tightly around the urban middle classes, the highwayman represented someone able to perform a social role while remaining detached from the conventions he exploited, able to pass freely in society without ever belonging to it. Every highwayman claimed to be a gentleman, and those who knew Turpin as John Palmer claimed ‘he lived like a gentleman’; but he was tried and executed as a labourer. To be a highwayman was to be an artist in social legerdemain.

It was this internal detachment, this freedom from the anxieties of respectability, that Ainsworth offered his readers. Twenty-five years later, himself caught up in an illicit relationship with a woman, John Stuart Mill was to write On Liberty, in which he identified a new species of liberty: freedom from the tyranny of public opinion. Ainsworth’s Turpin was attractive to his readers because he embodied precisely this freedom. In contrast, the rest of the novel, which centres on a curse that dooms the eldest Rookwood son in each generation to kill his wife (a curse which reminds one that onlookers wanted to commiserate with Mrs Ainsworth), is about inescapable fate. Turpin’s ride to York is not just about immortality and liberty; it also, obviously, has to do with speed: ‘The torrent leaping from the crag – the bolt from the bow – the air-cleaving eagle – thoughts themselves are scarce more winged in their flight.’ Black Bess flies along at twenty miles an hour. Turpin is enraptured, maddened, furious, intoxicated by speed.

‘The vehement excitement of continued swift riding produces a paroxysm in the sensorium, amounting to delirium.’ Hall, cot, tree, tower, glade, mead, waste or woodland, are seen, passed, left behind, and vanish as in a dream. Motion is scarcely perceptible – it is impetus! Volition! The horse and her rider are driven forward, as it were, by self-accelerated speed. A hamlet is visible in the moonlight. It is scarcely discovered ere the flints sparkle beneath the mare’s hoofs. A moment’s clatter upon the stones, and it is left behind … He was gone, like a meteor, almost as soon as he appeared. Peter Campbell described Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway of 1844 as an exercise in ‘the poetry of speed’ ( LRB, 3 June 2004 ). Rookwood was written a decade earlier.

The Great Western was yet to be built; work on the London and Birmingham (the first major railway line out of London) was just beginning; but the Liverpool and Manchester had been completed in 1830, and one of Stephenson’s engines had covered 15 miles in 25 minutes, an average of 36 mph; its normal speed was 20 mph. Nothing was more common than to compare locomotives to horses. Stephenson, for example, talks of holding ‘the reins of our horse’, and we still talk about ‘horsepower’. In Rookwood the metaphor is reversed. ‘Bess was a paragon,’ Ainsworth writes. We ne’er shall look upon her like again, unless we can prevail upon some Bedouin Chief to present us with a brood mare, and then the racing world shall see what a breed we shall introduce into this country. Eclipse, Childers, or Hambletonian, shall be nothing to our colts, and even the rail-road slow travelling compared with the speed of our new nags.

Ainsworth’s achievement in Rookwood was thus to knit together past and future, to imagine, at a time when the stagecoach took four days to get from York (with a 5 a.m. start) to London, what it would be like to make the journey at railroad speeds. His readers wanted to believe in Black Bess because they wanted to halt the pace of change around them, to think of speed as animal not mechanical. Rookwood is the first, reluctant novel of the steam age. This doesn’t occur to Sharpe. His idea of the historian as someone who gets at the facts means that he can give a fine account of the activities of Turpin and the Essex gang, but it makes him quite unfitted to be a reader of Rookwood. His argument is that the real Turpin was (despite ‘Turpin Hero’) rather insignificant; the heroic Turpin is the invention of Ainsworth. In which case a book about Turpin needs to handle fiction with the same confidence that it handles fact.

Sharpe could have been provoked by his subject into reinventing the idea of what history is: instead, his conclusion, ‘Dick Turpin and the Meaning of History’, retreats to the old cliché that the business of the historian is to deal in facts. David Starkey complains that the history syllabus in schools places far too little emphasis on facts, and far too much on critical thinking. Sharpe wants the best of both worlds, facts and critical thinking hand in hand. But a history that could answer the question ‘What can be read into the invocation of Turpin?’ would have to deal in more than just facts and go beyond the kind of source criticism that is normally meant by ‘critical thinking’. The language of fact and fiction, critical and uncritical thinking, is useful if one wants to address the question of whether Turpin was a thug. But it hardly helps one address the question of why Rookwood appealed to the imagination of its readers.

To understand this one needs to place side by side Ainsworth’s account of Turpin’s ride on Black Bess and the account given by the actress Fanny Kemble of her ride beside Stephenson on the footplate of his Northumbrian (‘a snorting little animal which I felt rather inclined to pat’) in 1830. They reached a speed of 35 mph: You can’t imagine how strange it seemed to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace … swifter than a bird flies. You cannot conceive what that sensation of cutting the air was … When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description; yet strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security and not the slightest fear. The year before, the MP Thomas Creevey had travelled by train, not exposed on the footplate but sitting safely in a carriage, at the relatively sedate speed of 23 mph.

He wrote: ‘But the quickest motion is to me frightful; it is really flying, and it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion of instant death to all upon the least accident happening. It gave me a headache which has not left me yet.’ With this new sensation of flying came a new understanding of what courage and sangfroid might be: Kemble had it and Creevey didn’t. Ainsworth wanted to take the side of the Kembles of this world against the Creeveys, and Turpin’s ride was his way of doing so. In this respect Rookwood is the first, enthusiastic novel of the steam age. In its complex ambivalence about the steam engine – enthusiastic about speed, reluctant to acknowledge the supremacy of machinery – it encapsulated a turning point in history. It is this ambivalence that gave life to the myth of Dick Turpin almost a hundred years after he stepped so calmly off the scaffold. While I wouldn’t want to persuade Sharpe that Turpin was a better man than he imagines, I would certainly want to suggest that Rookwood is a much more interesting novel than he recognises.

Richard "Dick" Turpin (1705 - 1739) - Find A Grave Memorial York North Yorkshire, England Legendary highwayman. Better known as Dick Turpin, he was a notorious highwayman and horse stealer. By the time he was 30 he had committed many crimes of murder and highway robbery, with a reward of �200 being offered for his capture. Turpin fled to Holland, but later returned to the North of England, where he was unknown. Here, he posed as a horse dealer under his mother's maiden name of Palmer. His freedom was short-lived however, and was arrested over a minor incident on the 2nd October, 1738, being sent to jail because he could not afford to pay bail. During investigations, evidence arose of his horse stealing, and he was sent to the Debtor's Prison. Here his true identity was unveiled, and he was hanged on York Tyburn (now part of York Racecourse) on April 7th, 1739 (bio by K. Smith).

Cause of death: Hung for his crimes Richard Turpin (1705 - 1739) - Genealogy Richard Turpin St George's burial ground, York Immediate Family: Added 2014-02-27 06:41:43 -0800 by Private User Collection: NewspaperARCHIVE.com Text: "...Turpin and John Strad were executed at Tyburn for The latter died very but the former with the to the very It was remarkable that as ...

Date: Apr 7 1739 - Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom Parents: Sep 21 1705 - Hempstead, Essex, England Death: Apr 7 1739 - York, Yorkshire, England Parents: John Turpin, Mary Elizabeth Turpin (born Parminter) Siblings: Sep 21 1705 - Hempstead, Essex, England Death: Apr 7 1739 - Knavesmere, York, UK Parents: John Turpin, Mary Turpin (born Palmer) Siblings: Thomas Turpin, Christopher Turpin, Mary Turpin, Dorothy Turpin, John Turpin, Ann Williams (born Shaftesbury Turpin) Wife: Sep 21 1705 - Hempstead, Essex Death: Apr 7 1739 - Tyburn, near Birmingham Parents: John Turpin, Mary Turpin (born Palmer) Siblings: Thomas Turpin, John Turpin, Christopher Turpin, Mary Turpin, Dorothy Turpin Wife: Sep 21 1705 - Hempstead, Essex Death: About Dick Turpin Dick Turpin Richard "Dick" Turpin (bap.

1705 – 7 April 1739) was an English highwayman whose exploits were romanticised following his execution in York for horse theft. Turpin may have followed his father's profession as a butcher early in life, but by the early 1730s he had joined a gang of deer thieves, and later became a poacher, burglar, horse thief and killer. He is also known for a fictional 200-mile (320 km) overnight ride from London to York on his horse Black Bess, a story that was made famous by the Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth almost 100 years after Turpin's death. Turpin's involvement in the crime for which he is most closely associated—highway robbery—followed the arrest of the other members of his gang in 1735. He then disappeared from public view towards the end of that year, only to resurface in 1737 with two new accomplices, one of whom he may have accidentally shot and killed. Turpin fled from the scene and shortly afterwards killed a man who attempted his capture. Later that year he moved to Yorkshire and assumed the alias of John Palmer.

While he was staying at an inn, local magistrates became suspicious of "Palmer", and made enquiries as to how he funded his lifestyle. Suspected of being a horse thief, "Palmer" was imprisoned in York Castle, to be tried at the next assizes. Turpin's true identity was revealed by a letter he wrote to his brother-in-law from his prison cell, which fell into the hands of the authorities. On 22 March 1739 Turpin was found guilty on two charges of horse theft and sentenced to death; he was executed on 7 April 1739. Turpin became the subject of legend after his execution, romanticised as dashing and heroic in English ballads and popular theatre of the 18th and 19th centuries, and in film and television of the 20th century. Dick Turpin: highwayman What happened on this day in history. APRIL 7th On this day in history, in 1739, Dick Turpin was hanged. Turpin had an illustrious career not only as a highwayman but as a cattle rustler.

Originally, he was a butcher from where he progressed to cattle thievery, joining a gang of criminals in Essex. By the time he was 30, Turpin had committed many crimes of cattle rustling and highway robbery and had a price on his head of ï¿½200. Unfortunately, Turpin accidentally shot the gang leader and was obliged to leave England to avoid arrest and retribution from fellow gang members. In 1738, Turpin returned to England where he set up business in Yorkshire, as a horse dealer under the alias of John Palmer. This business was no more than a cover for his true activity as a highwayman. Sad to say, Turpin was arrested for a minor incident in his pseudonym of Palmer and the ensuing investigation revealed his murky dealings. Turpin was hanged at York Tyburn where York racecourse now stands. The incident of Turpinï¿½s romantic non stop ride from London to York and fable of his mare Black Bess are merely fictional accounts by a nineteenth century Penny Dreadful writer.

Dick Turpin - The Legendary Highwayman and his horse Black Bess Dick Turpin Dick Turpin, much-romanticised through legend, was in fact an infamous highwayman, murderer and convicted horse-thief. He was tried and executed in York, assuring his place in English history and being forever linked with the city. The Only Way is Essex Richard ‘Dick’ Turpin was born in 1705 in Hempstead, Essex. His father John was an innkeeper and a butcher; Turpin became an apprentice butcher. He married at twenty and five years later, then with his own butcher’s shop, he aided the prolific deer-poaching Gregory Gang, disposing of carcasses. Landlord in Gangland London By 1734 Turpin had become landlord of a pub at Clay Hill. His association with the gang was such that he joined them in brutal attacks and robberies in the outer London area. In 1735 after three gang members were arrested the youngest betrayed his fellows, Turpin being named by The London Gazette. Foolishly Turpin and the gang immediately committed further shocking assaults in the Essex area with three more gang members arrested and executed at Tyburn on 10 March.

Turpin was named on the indictments for burglary. Dick Turpin’s Grave lies in St. George’s Graveyard in a mainly residential part of York Wanted Man Turning to highway robbery from April 1735, he plagued Epping Forest, Southwark and other London areas. On 10 July, identified and named as ‘Turpin the butcher’, along with Thomas Rowden with a bounty of £100 on their heads, the duo’s crimes continued throughout 1735. Next referred to in February 1737 Turpin reportedly spent the night at Puckeridge with his wife, her maid and another man. Turpin’s letter arranging the meeting (for horse stealing) was intercepted by the authorities. Turpin escaped while the others were arrested and imprisoned. Undeterred Highwayman The following month Turpin took up with highwaymen Matthew King and Stephen Potter, committing a series of robberies, culminating in an incident at Whitechapel when either King or Turpin stole a horse near Waltham Forest. Joseph Major, along with Richard Bayes, identified his animal, found tethered at The Red Lion, Whitechapel, and waited, along with the local constable, for the ‘owner’.

King’s brother eventually arrived leading them to his brother Matthew who received serious, but possibly accidental, gunshot wounds, dying the following month. Reports varied, stating Turpin or Bayes had shot King. Turpin fled into Epping Forest and on being spotted by Thomas Morris, who was armed, shot and killed him on 4 May with a carbine. ‘The Gentleman’s Magazine’ named Turpin as the suspect – a £200 reward was offered. Turpin a.k.a John Palmer comes to Yorkshire In June 1737, Turpin, under the alias John Palmer, lodged in Brough , East Yorkshire, posing as a horse trader. He regularly crossed the Humber committing crimes, stealing a horse from Pinchbeck, Lincolnshire, and riding it to his father’s at Hempstead. Leaving the horse behind, implicating his father who was subsequently committed to gaol, Turpin returned to Brough having stolen three more horses from a Thomas Creasy. Creasy finally tracked down and recovered his horses in autumn 1738, thefts for which Turpin was eventually tried.

His gravestone is the only one in the yard upstanding from the ground (top left) Locked up in York Castle After a minor incident in October 1738 Turpin threatened to shoot someone; three JPs attended and committed Turpin to the House of Correction at Beverley . The JPs’ suspicions of ‘Palmer’s’ lifestyle proved right when JPs from Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, confirmed Palmer was known there as a sheep-thief and suspected horse-thief who had evaded custody. Turpin was consequently transferred to York Castle on 16 October 1738, for the Assizes. Turpin’s final undoing came when his intercepted letter to his brother-in-law revealed his handwriting to James Smith who had taught Turpin to write. Smith travelled to York Castle identifying Turpin on 23 February 1739 and received the £200 reward originally offered following Morris’s murder. Found Guilty On 22 March York Assizes declared Turpin guilty on two charges of horse theft, passing the death sentence. Turpin bought a new frock coat and shoes, and hired five paid mourners.

On 7 April 1739 Turpin and John Stead (also a horse-thief) were paraded through York by open cart to Knavesmire, York’s equivalent of London’s Tyburn. Following the hanging, by a pardoned fellow highwayman, Turpin’s body was taken to an inn in Castlegate and buried next day in the graveyard of St George’s Church, Fishergate. It was shortly reportedly as stolen; however, the body-snatchers together with Turpin’s corpse were soon apprehended. The body was reburied, possibly with quicklime, and is alleged to lie in St George’s graveyard. Black Bess and the Legendary Journey to York In legend, Dick Turpin and Black Bess, his faithful mare, are synonymous for their supposed 200-mile ride from London to York, a tale originating in Rookwood (1834), a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth. It was in fact highwayman John ‘Swift Nick’ Nevison who, in 1676, after committing a robbery in Kent and urgently needing an alibi set off on the ride of his life reaching York in around 15 hours.

Through folklore Turpin’s violent character has become that of a romantic and dashing highwayman. Related posts: sadie · July 4, 2014 on 4:04 pm ridiculous they killed him by hanging him Bob · May 6, 2015 on 9:51 am No it’s not, he deserved it, he was evil sadie, killing loads of people. JAKE · June 23, 2015 on 7:22 pm i know we been leaning about highwaymen JAKE · June 23, 2015 on 7:23 pm i leaned i lot from this so its epic Paul · July 4, 2015 on 11:58 pm Yes it’s true he was a baddie and got what he deserved really I guess. Revealed: What 'devilishly handsome' highwayman Dick Turpin REALLY looked like | Daily Mail Online Revealed: What 'devilishly handsome' highwayman Dick Turpin REALLY looked like He is the legendary highwayman who roamed the countryside ruthlessly robbing almost anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path.

Over time Dick Turpin has been wrongly romanticised into a swashbuckling and carefree rogue. And his image as a strapping and handsome villain boldly riding his trusty steed Black Bess is also fictitious, it has been revealed. For police experts and historians have teamed up to produce the first 'real' image of Turpin in the 270 years since he went to the gallows. Devilishly handsome? Forensic experts used the latest technology to recreate the face of Dick Turpin, 270 years after he was hanged for his crimes Instead of a 'dandy highwayman' with the rugged good looks to send ladies swooning, Turpin had a pock-marked face with distinctly ordinary features. Using the latest technology, staff from North Yorkshire police have produced an e-fit image of the notorious criminal for an exhibition at York's Castle Museum. 'The results are not pretty,' said Dr Katherine Prior, a museum researcher. 'Richard Turpin is one of the most infamous highwaymen in the world, but interestingly very little information on what he actually looked like survives. There are no drawings or paintings of Turpin created during his lifetime.

All we have to go on are the descriptions from newspapers which were issued to aid his capture. 'We have worked with North Yorkshire Police to create an e-fit of Mr Turpin, just like they would do from a description of a criminal today.' The real story of Turpin is very different to the one depicted in many books and on television. The son of a farmer and publican from rural Essex, Turpin was born in 1706 and probably became a butcher's apprentice on the outskirts of London. His life as an outlaw began when he was caught stealing two oxen and fled into the countryside to escape arrest. He tried his hand at smuggling before teaming up with a gang to carry out more serious, violent and unpleasant crimes. Wanted poster: Forensic experts worked with York's Castle Museum to create an E-fit of Turpin, just like they would do from a description of a criminal today The gan targetted isolated farmhouses and terrorised and tortured the occupants into giving up their valuables. In one raid in Essex, Turpin heard of an old woman rumoured to keep £700 in the house. She refused to divulge the hiding place until Turpin hoisted her into an open fire.

Turpin and his crew robbed their way around the home counties, frequently torturing their victims. In 1735 the King offered a £50 reward - around £8,500 at today's prices - for his capture. The London Gazette gave his description as 'a tall fresh-colour'd man, very much mark'd with the Small-Pox, about twenty-six years of age, about five feet nine Inches high, liv'd some time ago at Whitechapel, and did lately lodge somewhere about Millbank, Westminster, wears a blue-grey coat, and a light natural Wig.' Within two years the bounty on his head doubled after the gang committed another heinous act. By this time Turpin had teamed up with 'Captain' Tom King, one of the best known highwaymen of the day, with a carefree nature and code of honour that was later falsely attributed to Turpin. King laughed in Turpin's face when he pulled a gun on him and demanded his money as he rode on horseback and they became partners in crime. Before long King was accidentally shot dead by Turpin.

King was arrested when he went to collect a horse and Turpin, who had been wating nearby, fired at the constables and killed his accomplice instead. Realising he had to change location, Turpin rode to Yorkshire. But the story that he rode from London to York in less than 24 hours was pure fiction. This most famous Turpin tale was invented a century later by the author William Harrison Ainsworth in his 1834 novel 'Rookwood.' In reality Turpin ended up living under a false name and his identity was revealed after he was arrested for a minor misdemeanour. Suspicions were aroused as allegations of his criminal behaviour surfaced. But he was trapped by a letter he sent to his brother from the dungeons at York Castle. His hand-writing was recognised and he was revealed as Dick Turpin and sentenced to death. On 19th April 1739 Turpin rode through York in an open cart bowing to the crowds. After chatting to the guards with his head in a noose he then boldly threw himself off the ladder to his death. Today a new interpretation of his 18th Century death row cell in York opens at the Castle Museum.

And his realistic image is the final piece in the jigsaw. Ian Greaves, one of the police e-fit specialists, said: 'It is nice to think that we are able to assist in putting a true picture together of the infamous highwayman, who spent his last days in the city of York.' Turpin's life of crime: * Turpin was a notorious member of the Essex Gang who ruthlessly robbed farmhouses across the Home Counties. * In one raid at Loughton, Essex, they escaped with an old woman's huge cash savings of £700 (£120,000 at today's prices) after Turpin is said to have hoisted her into an open fire to give up the treasure. * After a £50 reward (£8,500 today) was put on his head, Turpin narrowly escaped arrest by smashing through a window. * He teamed up with 'gentleman' highwayman Tom King after trying to rob him at knifepoint. King laughed and said:'What dog eat dog? Come brother Turpin.

If you don't know me, I know you and shall be glad of your company.' * In May 1737 he became a murderer when he shot a gamekeeper named Morris who tracked him to Epping Forest and challenged him at gunpoint. * Turpin killed his partner King by accident when he shot at constables who were arresting him. * Adopting the name John Palmer, he was arrested for a minor crime and revealed as the notorious highwayman when a letter from his jail cell in York gave him away. * Turpin's infamous non-stop ride from London to York was actually carried out by a 17th Century highwayman John 'Nick' Nevison but used in a book about Turpin.

Question: Dick Turpin was hanged in York. True or false?
Answer: True